Archive of entries posted by jfleck

stuff I wrote elsewhere: junior groundwater pumping and the “futile call”

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It’s complicated. That’s what I realized this morning as I engaged in the now-nearly-mandatory journalistic self-promotion exercise – tweeting my work. On one of the local water mailing lists, I was recently taken to task for feeding drought paranoia rather than pulling together comprehensive analyses. It’s a fair cop. I’ll try to keep it in …

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Stuff I wrote elsewhere: San Juan-Chama supply at risk from climate change

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Concerned the current drought will end? No worries, climate change has your back: Climate change is likely to render a key part of the water supply for Santa Fe and Albuquerque increasingly unreliable in coming decades, according to a new analysis by federal scientists. The San Juan-Chama project, which imports water from the mountains of …

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“just and stable titles to water”

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I spent the morning in an Albuquerque court listening to a fascinating legal argument about water rights. (Update: story from the am newspaper) The real issue, involving the way central New Mexico’s largest irrigation district allocates water, remains undecided  – this morning’s ruling was issued based on procedural issues rather than the substance at hand. …

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In America, we pump water out of the ground to put it in our rivers

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From Atlanta, another example of a concept we’re seeing increasingly here in the western United States – groundwater augmentation of dwindling river supplies: Georgia’s efforts to quench metro Atlanta’s thirst include a $1 billion proposal to pump water from one aquifer to another and then release it into the Flint River in times of drought. …

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